Friday, June 10, 2011

You Should've Seen Coney Island in Those Days

[Photos: Coney Island in the 1940s]

Today, there's a front-page photo in the Times showing Coney Island beach during yesterday's scorching temperatures on the East Coast. The picture is cropped in a way that makes the beach look totally jammed. Granted, the beach was very crowded yesterday, but when you look on the edges of the crop you can see that it's only a mid-section that's full, and there's a lot of space between some of those blankets.

But there was a time, before air conditioning and the Interstate Highway System and the suburbs, when a blazing hot day in New York brought a million people to Coney Island, nearly all by subway. Ah, you should've seen it in those days, to allude to Burt Lancaster's haunting line about the Atlantic Ocean in Louis Malle's movie "Atlantic City." (The actual line is: "The Atlantic Ocean was something then. Yes, you should've seen the Atlantic Ocean in those days.")

In some of those vintage Coney Island photos from the 40s and 50s, the beach is so full it seems that another person couldn't fit in, even greased with a full bottle of Coppertone. And those old photos bring to mind another movie allusion, Woody Allen's crack that German submarines tried to invade Coney Island during WW2 but were destroyed by the pollution.

Bio

Joe Sharkey's work appears in major national and international publications. For 19 years until 2015 he was a weekly columnist for the New York Times. He is now a weekly travel and entertainment columnist with the global website Travel.Buzz, as well as an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of Arizona, He has written five books, four non-fiction and a novel, one of which is in development as a movie. Previously, he was an assistant national editor at the Wall Street Journal and a reporter and columnist with the Philadelphia Inquirer.
On Sept. 29, 2006, he was one of seven people on a business jet who survived a mid-air collision with a 737 over the Amazon. All 154 on the 737 died. His report on the crash appeared on the front page of the New York Times and later in the Sunday Times of London magazine.
He and his wife Nancy (who is a professor of journalism at the University of Arizona) live in Tucson with horses and parrots. He is working on a new novel about an international travel writer who hates to travel.
"JoeSharkey.com" is Copyright (c) 2006-2015 by Joe Sharkey.